Fascinating article from Bruce Milligan's "Publishing Perspectives." Read the whole article by clicking on the title.
"Future contracts will reflect the multiple opportunities that authors have to market themselves and their works directly to their readers. “If you imagine a world in which authors ‘don’t need a publisher,’ it encourages the publisher to take a different view. The contract looks more like a service agreement. Publishers have scale and reach and access to funds that authors don’t have, but the paradigm looks slightly different.”